Development

MeeGo Community Builder taking shape

David Greaves is continuing to lead the charge to a community build system for MeeGo. Following on from his successes with OBS and Fremantle, MeeGo Core is next on his target, and it's making good progress with the necessary hardware sitting "somewhere in the US". David's current summary says:The current version co-exists with the maemo.org OBS and targets:MeeGo:1.0:Core ([i.e. the last] release). The plan is to add: MeeGo:Current:Core (always points to the latest release snapshot) and MeeGo:1.0.80.1.20100514.1:Core (each weekly snapshot).Hopefully we'll see this combine, be seen as one and be managed with the Fremantle community builder; and the long-scale maemo.org plans to migrate the autobuilder to OBS. This would give continuity to long standing Maemo contributors, some of whom (who wished not to be named) feel that the MeeGo community is trying to distance itself from everything maemo.org related.

Clarifying differences between Qt and "MeeGo Touch" framework

A number of developers on maemo.org, and meego.com, have expressed confusion and/or frustration with all the different Qt offerings for Nokia's simple, strategic developer offering. On MeeGo, there's Qt itself and the "MeeGo Touch" framework which is built on top of it. Symbian has a similar value-add API. "MeeGo Touch" isn't available on the netbook version of MeeGo, but will be on the handset one. Where do developers go to develop first class, cross-platform applications? Tero Kojo and Quim Gil have made it easier for vexxed developers:Use the normal Qt classes to make applications for MeeGo. Qt with Qt Mobility provides a lot of tools for the develoepr. No need to get into MeeGo Touch. Qt is there in all it's glory for developers, well documented and ready now. It is also present on all the other MeeGo UX's, enabling the possibility to port (or just re-compile if the app's UI lends itself to different resolutions) the app to all the MeeGo UX's.So there you go. Simples.

Packaging Java applications for Maemo

Ruediger Gad has devised a mechanism for packaging Java SE apps into Debian packages for Maemo:So far I uploaded the Cambridge Software Labs version of the OpenJDK to extras-devel non-free (package name icedtea6) and Ant to extras-devel. Reason for calling the OpenJDK version "icedtea6" is that the output of "java -version" reports it as "icedtea6".Further posts describe additional packages uploaded, and even discussion of swt-hildon to produce Hildonised SWT (a GUI toolkit for Java) applications.